Had my first Level 3 charge from the Phoenix area's first Level 3 charger this afternoon. The charger is located at 430 S. 2nd Avenue in Phoenix, at the Ecotality office.

Charged for 12 minutes, going from 3 (or 4) bars up to 8 bars. I'm not sure why it stopped at 8 bars, but it had to do with the '80% charge' setting I selected (which didn't behave like I expected). The charge is initiated from the LCD touchscreen, and starts under control of the charger, not the car. Even though I had a charge timer set, it started charging.

The charger was being tested by a couple of Ecotality engineers at the time, and is not officially open. They said they think the official announcement should be sometime this month.

The 'Quality Assurance' engineer invited me to a charge (as a guinea pig!). They said it was OK for me to invite the other forum members to bring their cars to charge up, even before they officially make the charger available. If there is nobody at the charger, they said you could knock on their door to get help.

The engineer indicated that these Blink chargers should be 'free' for another year - I hadn't heard that before, but I figured there was some deadline.

Very cool! I wish it was in a more useful location, but heck, progress is progress and having one installed means that (hopefully) more are on their way. Congrats on being one of the first (if not THE first!) in AZ!

phxsmiley wrote:The engineer indicated that these Blink chargers should be 'free' for another year - I hadn't heard that before, but I figured there was some deadline.

They are free until Jan. 1, 2013. I've been up there many times, but it wasn't ready so I called Blink and they said when it is available to the public, it would be on the Blink website map within minutes of going 'online'.Thanks for letting us know that they will allow charging now.

I learned some very interesting things today with the QC in Phoenix. Here's what happened: When I set it to charge to 90%, it charged to 89% on the QC Blink, 9 bars in the LEAF, and 76% on my SOC gauge. The ambient temp was 78 degrees. The starting voltage was 410. The battery temp was at 6 bars, but many hours before QCing, it was at 5 bars due to the cold morning. I started with two bars/30% on the gauge. It took 24 mins. to charge to 89%. Since I only had nine bars and 76% on my gauge, I decided to see what would happen at a 100% charge. So it took another 32 minutes to charge from 89% to 97% (car cut it off before 100% on the Blink) and it showed 12 bars (got 13 miles on the 12th bar/9 miles on the 11th going home) and 86% SOC on the gauge. It would only take 19 kW hs. If I had topped it off with an L2, it probably would have been around 21. Get this: The TOTAL capacity of the battery pack is 28.8kW hs (one of the ECOtality EEs was told this by Nissan when they were testing the battery pack)! A lot of us had been saying it was probably 28 and we were really close. Nissan is hiding more than what most people thought, and it isn't able to be read with our gauges. So my conclusion is that when you hit turtle and the car shuts down, you have an ACTUAL 20% left. It seems Nissan will not let you go below 20% or above 80%. This way, there 'warranty' will be covered. I'm now sure these batteries will last much longer than 8 years/100K. The only disappointing thing and BIG surprise for me is now I know if I'm on the Interstate, and I QC to 90%, I'm going to get less than 80% to use. And it will be interesting to see if others get the same results as I did using the Blink vs. a different QCharger.

Now in 2015 there are more L3 charging. Nissan dealers have free chargers at most locations. The Chandler, Gilbert Road Nissan dealer even has CHAdeMO and Combo ports so a BMW i3 could charge or a LEAF and other CHAdeMO port vehicles.

We gave Car Charging that took over EcoTality a list of 5 Blink L# to fix and keep up and running. They have been making progress.

Between Phoenix and Tucson GOe3 had some locations with L2 and L3 with every possible port. The first universal charge locations. This will be a big step for travel in an EV, unless of course you have a Tesla with Free Super Chargers all over the USA. (205) so far.

I occasionally drive my 2014 Leaf from Phoenix to Tucson and back. In the beginning, I used the recharging station on Florence rd to make the 'hop, skip, and a jump' trip beyond single charge range. The first time through they had L2 and L3 with the L3 on a arch with two plugs. The next time it was a single pedestal with both a Leaf and Tesla plugs and it was able to charge 100% in one hour plus L2 stations. The last time through they had ripped out all L2 and had a strange high speed plug that was not powered up anyway. The new Geo3(?) charging station at the old, abandoned mall had a L2, but they lock up the parking lot at 7PM. There is a new L3 in the new mall but it was hard to find and caused me to go around in circles so much I needed a tow truck to make it back to the Geo3, and then got kicked out when the locked up. Finally found the L3 across the freeway and used it on the way home. It was the most expensive I have ever used. Now my battery is dying and I probably don't have the range to make it even that far.